In this course taught by E. Michael Harrington, students will learn the basis for copyright including what is and is not covered by copyright law. This course will help clarify what rights artists have as creators as well as what the public is free to take from their work. Students will also learn what to do if someone copies their work and what to do if they are accused of copying someone else. Finally, the course will discuss how technology has changed copyright for the better (and worse) and how copyright laws may change in the coming years.

DC

I loved this course!\n\nVery informative on the Music Business.\n\nAlso learned a lot of good information about Copyright & Trademarks which I know will be helpful.

R

Jun 19, 2019

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

this course has changed my life and opened hidden doors to me

From the lesson

Copyright In Practice

In this lesson, we'll take a look at copyright law in practice. We'll begin by discussing the benefits and the potential legal pitfalls of a cowriting relationship. We'll also discuss the concept of fair use and identify examples of fair use in copyright. We'll take a look at the concept of independent creation and how that affects you as a creator. Finally, we'll discuss the public domain and learn how works enter, leave, and return to the public domain.

Taught By

E. Michael Harrington

Course Author

Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] In this video, we will discuss fair use. Fair use is something all of us have done and will continue to do. Fair use is the use of copyrighted material that you did not create. You use that-- someone else's material and you do not ask for permission. If you just hear it stated that way, it sounds like you infringe copyright. You're taking something you didn't create, and you're not asking permission, you're not paying for it, you're just using it. How can that ever be right? Well, it's how education is for example. If you're in high school and college and you have to write a term paper or some kind of paper, the teacher or professor doesn't want this to be 100% your thoughts. You don't have to look up any facts. You don't have to look at how other people have treated the subject. You're just going to spew stuff and that's that. Well, of course not. There are supposed to be some standards, here. You're supposed to know the field. And you have to look at other sources. You have to quote from newspapers, magazines, books, television shows. So the way it's always done is that you take an excerpt, you copy it, copy paste, film, however-- you take this work and you insert that into yours. What you do is you give attribution. You say, OK, it's from this writer at the Washington Post. It was published on this day, this page, and so forth. You do things like that. Another example where you see this is in professional sports. In a Major League Baseball game, that's considered a copyrighted event. They'll say near the end of the game-- they'll say any account of the events of this game, without the strict, express, written, permission of Major League Baseball is strictly prohibited. Now, that's something you've heard, and you've not paid attention to. We shouldn't pay attention to it. Because that's a copyright claim, but what that literally means is you cannot talk about the game. If Major League Baseball were to be that strict and authoritarian about, you can't talk about the game without permission-- society says otherwise. So that's a reason you'd break a copyright law, too, to talk about a Red Sox loss, a Red Sox win. That's another example of fair use. If you talk about a film with someone, then your work is derived from the film. If you speak about it in public, you are-- you probably would want to think that's fair use. To consider something a fair use, you need to consider at least four factors. In other words, how do you take someone else's work? And they give you, kind of, a guideline. First factor is, what is the point of your use? Are you copying material to use in a nonprofit situation or educationally? You have a paper to submit to the professor? That would be educational. Or are you copying to then insert it in your song that you're going to sell? That would be for profit. And the law would tend to say nonprofit is more fair of a use than for profit. And that seems sensible. The second thing to consider is, what is the material you're copying from? Is it factual? Or is it fictional? Facts and news sources and news events are not creative. Remember, copyright is to protect creators. And creators aren't necessarily going to just try to be strict and just do the news. It's stories-- it's stories they make up. It's talking about feelings, it's not talking about facts. So the second factor is, is it fact or fiction? And the law protects creative and fiction much more than it protects factual works. The third is an important factor. It's kind of in two parts. It's what's the amount you're taking from that other work? And what's the substantiality of it? By that, they're meaning, is it the most important part? Is it the most original, creative part? That gets to be very important. I call it the quantity and the quality of it-- the amount and substantiality. So you could take a small work, a small amount, but it could be the most important part of a song, for example. OK, well, I only took the chorus, and the chorus is short. Yeah, but it's the chorus. Where if you took a long chunk of a bridge or something else that wasn't as important, it'd be a different argument for fair use. The fourth factor is, what is the effect on the market of your copying? Like you're copying and you're creating a new work and you release your new work. Would your new release hurt the market for the original? And that's an important consideration. If it did hurt, then that would tend to say, well, that's not a fair use because look what it's doing to what you copied from. So those four factors are spelled out. There's one more that always is a part of it, but is never really enunciated clearly. And that is, when you copied something, did you give it transformative use? Did you add value to it? Did you do more than just copy? You copied and added new words. You changed something. You did something other than just copying. So that's the transformative factor. Did you add transformative value? And transformative value, that phrase, is in a lot of copyright cases. So to repeat, there are those four factors-- four and the other one I just said-- to determine whether the use is fair or not. And you kind of go through them in a checklist kind of way, but you can't be assured your copying is going to be OK with the person you copied from. To repeat, is your use for educational, nonprofit purposes? Or for for profit uses? Are you copying creative material, the fictional poems and creative expression? Or are you copying factual material? It's better to copy facts than it is to copy creative expression. The third is the amount and substantiality. How much did you take? If you copied from a book and you took 30 pages out of a 70 page book, obviously, that's a gigantic chunk of a book to copy. That wouldn't be good. But what's the originality and the quality of that material? So the amount and substantiality. The fourth is, what's the effect on the market? Does your new song now hurt the other song? Doesn't happen too often, but it can. And the fifth factor really is, have you given this transformative value? Or did you simply just copy?

Explore our Catalog

Join for free and get personalized recommendations, updates and offers.